Box Office: Why 'Birth Of A Nation' Was Doomed

Scott Mendelson
, ContributorI cover the film industry.Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

'Birth of a Nation' image courtesy of Fox Searchlight

Ten months after its rapturous debut at the Sundance Film Festival and two months after the narrative became not about the film but the filmmaker's past, The Birth of a Nation opened with a relative thud. Nate Parker's Nat Turner biopic opened with $7.004 million in its first three days of national release. That's lower than the $7.5m that Matthew McConaughey's Free State of Jones opened with in June of this year. That's barely more than the $6.2m that Gina Prince-Bythewood's Beyond the Lights (which co-starred Nate Parker and Gugu Mbatha-Raw) opened with in October of 2014. Pro tip: go rent Beyond the Lights. And, perhaps most strikingly, it's lower than the $8.1m opening weekend of the Oprah Winfrey and Danny Glover's (terrific) Beloved way back in Oct. of 1998.

You can make the case that the initial reaction was little different than any number of Sundance premieres that fizzled in theatrical release, such as The Spitfire Grill or The Details. We can argue that perhaps the "this story onscreen at last" feeling, combined with the idea that Nate Parker's stirring biopic would be something of an antidote to Hollywood and the Academy's macro problems regarding inclusiveness on both sides of the camera, is partially to blame for the difference between the Sundance reception and the general critical response. To be fair, there were Sundance journalists who didn't love the film but didn't speak out at the time.

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The eventual controversy that broke out two months ago and became the prime narrative didn't help either. For those who don't know, Nate Parker and his co-writer Jean McGianni Celestin were both charged with rape over an incident that occurred while they were at Penn State together in 1999. Parker was acquitted while Celestin was initially convicted only to have said conviction tossed on appeal. This was out there for years in the sense that it wasn't under lock-and-key, but it wasn't public knowledge.

The details of the case being thrust onto a national stage, revelations that the alleged victim had committed suicide in 2012, and Parker's alleged lack of appropriate contrition and remorse, kept the film in the headlines for all the wrong reasons over the last two months. It also made the film's gender problems, using the sexual assault of black women to move black men to violent action and to give Nat Turner and his men particular crowd-pleasing targets for their vengeance, feel like more than just conventional "heroic man" biopic issues.

But that's all context of the events leading up to the release. What if, to use my favorite Matrix Reloaded quote, whatever happened happened and couldn't have happened any other way?

Yes, I too hoped that the film would become something of a mainstream hit, playing like a leggy studio programmer at least along the lines of "great/important white men" biopics like The Imitation Game. And perhaps with better reviews, especially in the week or so before release, along with a more action-y finale, that might have been the case. I too was excited that Nate Parker went with Fox Searchlight's $17.5 million offer instead of Netflix's $20m payday specifically because he wanted a wide theatrical release. But what did we really have here? We had a grim and violent slave drama with no movie stars that ended up with mixed-positive reviews.

Whether or not you liked it more or less than I did, that doesn't scream "Saturday night at the movies."

When it comes to "serious adult movies," the reviews do matter. When you're trying to convince moviegoers of all demographics to spend time and money on a film that isn't cinematic escapism or some form of popcorn entertainment, you need to make the case that it's a really good movie. What did the reviews tell people heading into the weekend? They said The Birth of a Nation was at-best merely "good" (an average grade of 78% fresh, 7.2/10 on Rotten Tomatoes and a 68% on Metacritic), that it had serious "male savior" issues in regards to fridging its female characters, and that it wasn't even that outrageously Mel Gibson-y violent in terms of its action finale.

With no movie stars (Gabrielle Union was arguably the biggest name, but she had zero lines of dialogue) and no "you must see this because it's important and/or terrific" motivation, audiences of all demographics just opted for the more escapist offerings. Sadly, moviegoers of all stripes also ignored Walt Disney's somewhat "good for you" Queen of Katwe earlier this month, and that was a crowd-pleasing underdog sports drama.

This goes back to something I discuss quite a bit when we all pretend to be surprised by big opening weekends for the likes of Think Like a Man or The Perfect Guy. Black audiences, to the extent to which they are any sort of monolith moviegoing demographic, go to the cinema to "escape" just as much as any other demographic. They want comedies (The Best Man Holiday), adventures (The Equalizer), and fantasies (Captain America: Civil War) too, and all the better if they happen to star/feature actors who look like them.

So the idea that The Birth of a Nation, especially in its present "just barely good enough to merit a soft pass" form, was going to become a big hit may have been more about wishful thinking that practical analysis. Mea culpa.

12 Years ASlave, to use an obvious example,had rapturous reviews and respected names/movie stars (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Brad Pitt, Alfre Woodard, Michael Fassbender, Benedict Cumberbatch, etc.) and it made "just" $56 million domestic three years ago. Selma earned $52m domestic just under two years ago.

We've been down this road before, at least as long ago as John Singleton's Rosewood, which earned $13.1 million in 1997 while audiences comparatively flocked to Good Burger ($23m) and Booty Call ($20m). That's not a judgment, by the by. Audiences of all stripes will usually pick a somewhat "fun" commercial offering over the grim "good for you" cinematic item unless the reviews designate said "tough sit" as essential viewing.

So, what if the reason audiences of all stripes generally ignored The Birth of a Nation on opening weekend was something as simple as the fact that there was something better in the marketplace? Pop quiz: What's the other movie now playing at a theater near you directed by a black man, starring a black man, and concerning a group of "not majority white" male avengers embarking on a bloody campaign to kill a bunch of really evil white people? If you guessed the Antoine Fuqua-directed and Denzel Washinton-starring The Magnificent Seven, you win!

That film earned $7.9 million in its third weekend of national release, giving the $90m Sony/MGM western a $75m 17-day total. Said "What's the opposite of white washing?" action western hit is a wholly commercial entertainment that happens to star the biggest black star in Hollywood (give or take Will Smith). It offers something at least somewhat similar to The Birth of a Nation, complete with potent topicality (a group of racially diverse gunfighters team up to save a bunch of terrified white people from a capitalistic white tyrant)and mostly lacks the "problematic" issues regarding the current film and its filmmakers.

It's also a more overtly entertaining and (I would argue) better movie. So if you're a casual adult moviegoer, regardless of race, who doesn't necessarily see everything in theatrical release and doesn't make it their mission to see the would-be prestigious pictures as a matter of principal, you're probably going to spend that "once a month" date night/movie night seeing something like The Magnificent Seven.

So, does that mean that Fox Searchlight was "wrong" to pay as much as it did for the movie? With the caveat that I'd rather see more films like The Birth of a Nation get big theatrical distribution deals than fewer, maybe. First of all, it's not entirely impossible that the film won't factor into the Oscar race, although the critically-acclaimed likes of Moonlight, Loving, and (presumably/hopefully) Fences and Hidden Figures make that a lot less likely. Second of all, while I'd wager the film will play more like Free State of Jones ($7.5 million debut, $21m domestic total), legs are not impossible. Moreover, the overseas story is not yet written.

But the buy was fueled by the Sundance excitement, as well as the presumption that the film was good enough to overcome its commercial obstacles and make itself into mandatory viewing by virtue of its quality and its place in the Oscar race. Scandal or no scandal, those things didn't and/or probably won't happen.

Absent strong reviews and movie stars, the Nat Turner drama was always going to be a hard sell for general moviegoers just looking for a night out at the multiplex. And the terrible pre-release publicity merely removed the film's would-be moral imperative. Nate Parker's biopicalso had the misfortune of opening alongside a wholly commercial action movie which offered much of what it was selling concerning onscreen/behind-the-scenes inclusivity and of-the-moment topicality bundled up in crowd-pleasing entertainment.

Whether or not you take Birth of a Nation vs. The Magnificent Seven as coincidence or metaphor, the more popcorn-ish entertainment is always going to win out against the "good for you" offering. The Birth of a Nation had to be great to be a hit. It wasn't, so it probably won't.

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